Anzac; Australian, New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC).
The works are influenced by the succinct phraseology used by these soldiers in the First World War. These often innocuous or even silly words encompass the many shades of fear, anger, and sorrow concisely. A flat description of location such as fourteen trees becomes a deadpan piece of black humor for a place where an entire wood once stood. A grisly improvised infantry bomb becomes a child’s treat, a cherished cigarette the nail in one’s own coffin, smoked by the already dead.

The paintings, informed by this phraseology are subdued by the cumulative weight of layered color and marks, built up and dug into. Small and blunt they aim for the same effect, a transformative ability to take the inconceivable and make it simple, tangible. They can never touch the same sort of joyous fatalism of the original words, or the experiences behind them, only serve as sorry mimicry in our shared reality.